Reconnecting America today released Are We There Yet? Creating Complete Communities for 21st Century America, an ambitious report that tracks progress in America’s regions toward a vision of complete communities.

On May 29, Reconnecting America President & CEO John Robert Smith gave the morning keynote address at the Tennessee Obesity Task Force gathering in Nashville. Later, he was interviewed and that interview was recorded. Click on the links below to watch the video on each topic.

With this bill Congress had the opportunity to establish a transportation program that would support communities' efforts to become more sustainable and economically resilient. Unfortunately, the conference report missed this opportunity and is in many ways a retreat from these goals. While I am pleased to see that funding for public transit was preserved at current levels, rather than being cut by 30% as was proposed last year, and that some transit-oriented development (TOD) language was included, the bill could have done so much more to provide transportation choices for people in rural, suburban, and urban areas to connect them with jobs, education, healthcare, and opportunity.

The United States needs to link transportation and climate change policies if it hopes to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions enough to ward off the worst impacts of global climate change, according to a new study by the Center for Clean Air Policy.

A trio of papers that look into transit ridership and the factors influence the decisions on how to get from here to there have been added to the Best Practices section.
Office Development, Rail Transit, and Commuting Choices
While housing is generally the focus of transit-oriented development discussions, job centers are equally important, according to a paper by Robert Cervero, professor and chair of the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley.
"In the end, concentrating housing near rail stops will do little to lure commuters to trains and buses unless the other end of the trip—the workplace—is similarly convenient to and conducive to using transit.," Cervero concludes.
In California, central business district office workers with rail stations nearby are nearly three times more likely to commute by transit than workers in decentralized employment centers. Factors…

The utilitarian 1970s-style streetscape of New York could be transformed into narrow European-style roadways shared by pedestrians, cyclists and cars, all traveling at low speeds under guidelines established by the city's first street design manual. And one of the first examples of this new vision will take shape near Times Square when a section of Broadway is turned into a pedestrian mall.

Transportation for America Director James Corless testified before the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation today (April 28), saying the US needs a cohesive national transportation policy with clear objectives and performance measures to gauge progress. He said these measures should include reducing driving by 16 percent in 20 years, and tripling walking, biking and transit use. Reconnecting America co-chairs the “T4America” campaign, which is working with Congress on reauthorizing the six-year federal transportation bill that provides hundreds of billions of dollars for transportation projects. The coalition has grown to include 250 organizations ranging from AARP to the National Association of Realtors, and 18,000 individuals and elected officials.